Posted
by
Soulskill
on Tuesday March 15, 2011 @02:20AM
from the mobile-killed-the-console-star dept.

RedEaredSlider writes "Angry Birds marketing lead Peter Vesterbacka went on the offensive today against his console counterparts, arguing that the model pursued by companies like Nintendo is 'dying.' In a panel discussion at the South by Southwest Interact conference in Austin, Texas, Vesterbacka said that innovation wasn't coming from large development firms like EA and Ubisoft, but from smaller, more nimble developers like his own. Vesterbacka also pointed to the major concern over the price model for console games. Compared to mobile titles like Angry Birds that run for 99 cents, games on large consoles hover around fifty dollars. Still, the executive did admit that the business model for mobile games had yet to be completely figured out."

I do think it might turn up the pressure on the old business model a bit (which is probably a good thing, IMO). You'll always be able to justify spending $50 for the amount of entertainment that something like Fallout gives, but when decent games start popping up for very little cash, you think twice about dropping that much on some slightly updated sports game. Back when there was no such thing as a $1 game, even the crappy ones seemed better value at full price. The biggest potential risk, I think, is the market swinging too far the other way and making big-budget epics untenable, in the same way that cheap reality TV is detracting from more expensive but higher quality shows.

in the same way that cheap reality TV is detracting from more expensive but higher quality shows.

But I think reality TV is only detracting from quality shows because air time is the limiting resource. I've heard of good shows getting pushed out of their time slot by crappy reality TV, sure, but games don't have time slots. They might not suffer the same fate. Movies might be a better comparison. Hollywood makes big-budget films in addition to cheap movies since the two aren't competing for showtimes, at least not quite as directly as reality TV shows compete with real TV shows.

Well, everyone knows that the tens of millions of real gamers out there are about to throw out their high resolution beefy PC gaming and 65" 1080p gaming to play rip-offs of 30 year old Scorched Earth / Tanks / Etc games and very minimal and lacking versions of sim and god games on a 320x200 flash/html5 interface on a social network web page!

Now, is it likely that there will be more of these casual/social gamers who spend all of their time playing these idiotic "recruit your friends to improve in the game!" pyramid schemes on very rudimentary and simple games than there are who play "real" video games? Absolutely. The same way there are more people that listen to Britney Spears than will ever listen to, say, Tom Wait. But that doesn't mean that one market is dumped and ignored in favor of the other. There will be a huge market for free or cheap casual games that you can play on the bus on your way to your job answering phones at the dentist's office or while you're waiting for your kids to finish soccer practice. And there will be a big market for involved, innovative, complex, competitive "traditional" gaming that the rest of us enjoy.

Also, Scott Pilgrim vs The World was modelled after a very pixellated Double Dragon style 80s side-scrolling beat'em'up. Amazing 8 bit soundtrack by Anamanaguchi too. In today's world, you could call that innovative.

It's hardly like Angry Birds or Plant vs Zombies were innovative. The only difference is that they're on a touchscreen mobile device instead of being 00s flash games or 90s shareware.

Also, Scott Pilgrim vs The World was modelled after a very pixellated Double Dragon style 80s side-scrolling beat'em'up. Amazing 8 bit soundtrack by Anamanaguchi too. In today's world, you could call that innovative.

I love what they did with Scott Pilgrim, but (fairly slavishly) aping a format that the target demographic of the film will have nostalgic feelings about, doesn't really count as innovation. Especially when the template had been set by Mega Man 9 (a next-gen title that could have been implemented on a NES).

Is saying something "isn't innovative" bad mouthing it? There are many thousands of books, movies, games, etc, that are not innovative, but they do what they set out to do well. I tried Plants vs Zombies and it didn't seem like a particularly bad game, but it just felt like a combination of other flash/puzzle games I've played in the past, and it took way too long to ramp up the difficulty. I saw my flatmate play his first game for something like an hour or two, and when I tried playing it myself I got bore

I hope you realize Angry Birds was a literal clone (not just influenced) by Flash games that appeared about 4-5 years ago. Even Halo was more innovative and that's saying awfully little.

In far from contesting it.
However, my question is: what innovative games came out of UbiSoft/EA in the latest 2 years??!

Let me re-phrase: is maybe the case that both of the CEO-s are right when saying that the gaming on "the other platform" is dying?Just that they don't see the beam in their eye but only the straw in the eye of the other?

The only place he might have a point is not that demand for real games will go down, but that production of them will. If I can spend a week coding a Farmville clone, and make millions, vs paying a team of game designers and programmers for a year to develop a game and make millions, I'm gonna make FarmvilleClone. The profit margin is that much higher.

We've already seen it happen in TV with the explosion of reality shows. They're crap, every last one of them, but they're all over the place. Even Big Brother kept being renewed despite the first season having ratings somewhere south of the sub-basement. Why? Because even with crap ratings, they made more money on it than they would have from a traditional scripted show.

It's all about profits and profit margins. Quality will always take a back seat to money, and if you can manage to convince a gillion people to play your stupid little incessant-click game, you get rich a lot faster than the company who spends all that time making something good.

Which part exactly do you have a problem with? The generic soccer mom stereotype was perhaps a bit much, but the rest is all true. Those of us that have seen games improve since the 70s and 80s don't really appreciate the steps backwards that are being caused by those who suddenly have noticed that computer games can be fun. The thing is that most of these people suck at games though, and won't enjoy anything remotely complex. I saw an interview with a World of Goo creator who said that the comments pages of mobile versions of the game were filled with morons who ask incredibly dumb questions that never get asked by people using the PC and console versions. They even added a "skip level" button for those that can't be bothered to actually play the game.

I'm aware of this. I have helped out many uninformed people when doing IT support. There is a big difference between the morons, and those that choose to learn. They both start off in the same place, but the morons stay at the "don't want to know, just make it work already damnit!" level, while the not-morons ask questions and try to help themselves first before relying on others.

Have a look at this interview [2dboy.com]. Here are some nice comments from some true morons:

“I don’t know how the heck you do this!!!!!!!!!! “Drag and drop to build the pipe”? WHAT???? Somebody please tell me how to do this!”

“I’m only on the 6th level and I hate this game. Levels are ridiculously hard from the start and are just stupid. I spent an hour on one level and still cannot beat it. Screw this crap. Worst. Purchase. Ever.”

“Don’t get it, it will get you very frustrated if you don’t beat a level bottom line don’t get it”

I think what is actually happening isn't that hardcore gamers are playing (or even give a shit) about casual game but instead large numbers of females who never played are suddenly discovering gaming thanks to FB and are finding out not all games involve giant explosions and huge battles (only the best ones like Just Cause 2 IMHO).

Take my GF for example. She would watch me play something like FEAR or Bioshock and go "Oh I don't see how you can stand that, it's too scary!" but since finding games like Farmville on FB she has seen there is plenty of games out there that don't require twitch reflexes or having the latest hardware. Now she thinks she is ready to move up a little so this weekend I'll be bringing her an old FX5200 out of the junk pile and the first CSI game. If she enjoys that and wants to go higher then I'll slowly build her her own gaming PC

So I don't think it is so much a revolution or any changing of the way we game, it is simply that there are tons of women out there that have never spent a dime on games suddenly finding out there are games that they can enjoy as much as we do shooters. Hell even my 68 year old mom is playing those little murder mystery games now, and she hadn't played (or bought) a single game since Age Of Empires I back in 96.

I think they have simply stumbled over the right formula to make "chick games" and like chick flicks they can make serious money. I doubt it'll change the shooters and RPGers any, although the price does need to come down. $50 in a recession? That is just nuts. Now I do nearly all my shopping on Steam and Amazon and rarely pay more than $20 for a game. $50 for a single game is just too damned high. hey maybe we need a "games are too damned high" party?

Yeah, and the dumb thing is, it's not like we haven't seen this happen before.

"Arcades are dying! Games are moving into the home!""PC games are dying! Games are moving to the consoles!""Consoles are dying! Games are moving to the smartphones!"

This can also be applied to statements that "Game Company X is dying!" "Game genre Y is dying!", etc. The game's industry does love its' doomsayers.

Meanwhile, while arcades actually did die, sort of, neither PC games nor home consoles seem to have. A few trends get set, and followed, because the industry's direction is set by clueless managers who follow the market leader religiously. The prophecies are occasionally self fulfilling, particularly when it comes to moving on to the next console generation, which often has the feel of a mass migration.

Here's the useful rule to apply: If someone says "X mode of gaming is dying", ask them what they think will replace it. If they answer something that isn't up to the task, they're surely wrong. At best, in lieu of "dying" the mode of gaming in question will undergo a dry spell, or be reduced in importance.

Being greatly reduced in importance, and/or underoing a protracted dry spell, would fit the definition of "dying" in the context of most of these statements.

Arcades did, for all intents and purposes, die.

Before there were consoles or handhelds, there was only PC gaming. Now the audience for video gaming extends to consoles and handhelds, and those platforms have bigger audiences. PC gaming isn't nonexistent, but neither are arcades. Both are reduced in importance, and arguably undergoing a protracted dry sp

The above comment is inaccurate and makes the rest of your post suspect.

Consoles were there in the 70s and early 80s, then "died" (or went through a protracted "dry spell," as you say), then came back during the late 80s, just in time for PCs to finally not suck and start competing.

Unless you are including microcomputers under the "PC" label (which is a stretch, to say the least), such as the Apple II and the Commodore 64. Oh wait, the Atari 2600 and the Intellivision were already entrenched in the home-gaming mainstream market for at least 3 years by the time those two started seriously competing as video game machines.

And if you factor in the hand-held single-game machines, such as those by Mattel-Electronics, Texas Instruments, Casio, and just about anybody who made silicone chips back in the day, you can put "mobile" gaming devices almost 10 years before even the venerable Mode X in DOS was popularized.

The point is that the trend has always been to go from niche to mainstream by way of commoditization and personalization of the devices. DIY kits gave way to ready-made micro-computers; early arcade machines gave way to home video game machines; and so it seems natural that complex, custom-rigged PCs will be displaced eventually by simpler, cheaper, and more personal commodity devices like mobile phones or tablets.

You have an exec of an Indie game which probably never expected to make so much money.

An EA exec on the other hand is employed to get the maximum money for the shareholders. More often then not experimental games don't make as much revenue as the mainstream ones. You mess up, you get fired. So it is safer for the exec to release another NFL/FPS/Sims game then it is to make something new.

You have an exec of an Indie game which probably never expected to make so much money.

An EA exec on the other hand is employed to get the maximum money for the shareholders. More often then not experimental games don't make as much revenue as the mainstream ones. You mess up, you get fired. So it is safer for the exec to release another NFL/FPS/Sims game then it is to make something new.

Looking at the economics (in terms of motivations and the psychology of situations), the basic question can also be broken down to which group the exec is trying to please.

For the indie company, privately owned, management needs to look at the bottom line -- sales, where the money comes in -- and is thus beholden to the customers.

For the major corporation, post-IPO and publicly owned, management needs to look at the top line -- profits, the numbers that affect the share price -- and is thus beholden to t

The market penetration of game consoles has been decreasing ever since the 80's.

And now smartphones are taking over. Only caveat is they market is even more fragmented as consoles were in the mid 80's. In those days there was basically one major console at a time. Now we have many smartphone OSes and handsets at a time.

The market penetration of game consoles has been decreasing ever since the 80's.

Subject says it all.
Show me the report that suggest the NES sold through more consoles than the PS2, and then we'll talk. Show me the report that suggest more people owned a single Gaming Console in the 80s than do in the 00s and then we'll talk. Back that up with ANYTHING, and then we'll talk.

It's difficult to find numbers for these kinds of things, but keep in mind that the PS2 was available in many more countries than the NES. The PS2 sold over 100 million units, sure, but I distinctly remember seeing a record showing the sales data in the US alone to be about the same for both consoles. I can't for the life of me find it, though. Ah well.

It is not difficult to find numbers for these things at all there are loads of numbers tracking sites inclduing stuff like vgchartz.com or even NPD, unless you are trying to find numbers that prove the OP right then your right as you will have a hell of a time finding others to make up crap like that. The simple fact is current console sales are significantly larger than any previous generation

NES+ sega master sold around 75 million

then we move to the megadrive and SNES with a combined total of approxi

Android is a step in the right direction, but it's not uniform enough to be a compelling game platform on it's own. Dealing with different screen resolutions/sizes, CPU power, and memory differences on a PC is bad enough, but on a mobile device we're talking differences of a factor of 10x or more.

For the sole purpose of gaming apps, I think Google will have to start segregating Android phones into different classes in order to provide a coherent user experience.

Well yeah, but I doubt anynoe would disagree with "overhyped". Its essentially the same catapult-the-castle game that's been around for years. Its pretty, polished, funny, and very long- worth every penny I think. But its hardly groundbreaking.

Talking about it like its going to be the "next generation of gaming" is almost as stupid as the Guitar Hero execs claiming their game was "the future of listening to music" (and we all know how that one worked out).

He talks about how "innovation wasn't coming from large development firms like EA and Ubisoft, but from smaller, more nimble developers like his own.".... yet, angry birds is an obvious rip off of another game, Crush the Castle, which was developed by Armor Games quite some time before A.B.
Try it out for yourself...
http://armorgames.com/play/3614/crush-the-castle [armorgames.com]

You're both off. They're both very much based on Scorched Earth, from 1991. A game that probably 95% of us have played at some point (especially in the 90s). I'm pretty sure Scorched Earth wasn't the original, either, but it was sure as fuck a site earlier than the supposedly "innovative" Angry Birds (and all the flash games that were around long before Angry Birds that were essentially the same thing, too).

The success of Angry Birds is kind of like the band that is beloved for decades and never receives the commercial or critical success and acclaim. Decades after, another band comes along and essentially rips off their entire personal and style and sound and maybe even directly cops some of their music and it's at just the right time that everyone in the world hears it and digs it and THEY receive acclaim and success for being geniuses, when all they really did was cop from the real geniuses. Your mom and your little sister have no idea about video games and as far as they're concerned, Angry Birds is the most original, entertaining, and incredible thing ever invented and well worth their $20. Why the rest of the world isn't calling it for what it really is, I have no fucking clue.

The original graphical artillery games were early 80s, apparently [wikipedia.org], but I think it's a stretch to call them the basis for Angry Birds. Yes, they both use ballistic trajectories, but the gameplay is quite different; if Angry Birds were based solely on Scorched Earth, then I'd say all credit to them - it's been changed enough to be called innovative. That said, it probably wasn't entirely original, since Crush the Castle is near-identical and came out first.

It's just the way things go. Some guy happens to get caught in a perfect storm of marketing, word-of-mouth, and general new technology buzz, and suddenly there's a new multi-millionaire on the block. Doesn't matter whether they were the best, or the first, they were just the luckiest.

I think the point is while they might be different there is little or no innovation in the game Angry birds, it does nothing a 100 other games hadn't already done, they just managed to get lucky on market appeal. That's not to say I think EA etc are particularly innovative either, I just think this guy is blowing smoke up his own arse with no real justification.

Actually its not that far form golf... but with larger targets. A game that involves moving an object over a distance while avoiding obstacles to hit a target is far from innovative. It's been around (in RL) for at least seven hundred years... and simulated in games since the earliest home computers.

And before the days of mobile phones many school kids played a game something like Angry Birds on the Wood&Elastic platform... sometimes even building the gaming device themselves.

So what? That is what innovation is all about. Look around you, everything is a rip-of or an improvement of previous inventions. It's that what the whole "content industry", the governments, other industries don't get. They all looking to maximize their profits and not looking at the costs.

The whole humanity and modern civilization is based on rip-offs and incremental improvements. No idea is original and nobody could do anything without the previous people's hard work. Please, I dare you, while looking aro

I played a throw-the-bomb-over-the-landscape game back in 1982. It was on my uncle's 'portable' computer, where portable meant the size of a suitcase. The screen was a massive 10cm and every pixel was green.

You're all missing the point. If you read other interviews by the Rovio execs, you'll see that the gameplay is almost secondary for them. What they consider innovative about their game is that there are birds, and they are angry, and their enemies are pigs and there's a good reason for them to hate each other.

Rovio is all about the business of innovative Intellectual Property -- the story, the backstory, and the emotional appeal of their game. And they have a point. If Angry Birds had been a game about

Wow. The idea of launching stuff in a parabola is one thing, but that's almost 100% identical to Angry Birds with slightly different controls and different graphics. There's no way AB wasn't a ripoff of that game.

Actually Angry Birds gameplay stems even back to the first computer games, does anyone of you guys still remember one of the first multiplayer games where two players where behind their own castle and the entire gameplay evolved around hitting the other player. There were myriads of variants of this gameplay, one being single player with different levels the other one being multiplayer with two players etc...

I keep referring to Scorched Earth, from 1991, as it's probably the most widely recognized and played game from the "artillery" genre and a great demonstration of how Angry Birds is any fucking thing except innovative.

To be more specific, however, Scorched Earth and Gorillas came out in 1991. Other games since then that you might recognize as pre-dating Angry Birds by a very long time is Gorillas 2 (also in the early 90s) and Scorched3D just awhile back. Pretty much everyone is also familiar with the Worms

Mirror's Edge is an example of why innovation in AAA titles is risky. It *was* innovative, it cost a lot to make, the critics didn't like it, it didn't sell very well.

I really liked the idea of it, but on playing the demo, decided it wasn't for me.

From a business perspective, it would have made more sense for an indie -- or an indie-like team within a major -- to test that mechanic in a smaller, cheaper game. One where the audience will forgive less glossy graphics, a shorter experience, etc.

I agree, Portal shows how it's done properly: Portal 1 was short & cheaper. Since it worked so well, Portal 2 is a regular AAA title with the very same concept (plus minor additions so the critics have something to ramble about).

Flash in the pan says: Oh, fuck! Throw more money and attention at me, before all of my silly spinoffs die on the vine!

I'm not going to debate that mobile gaming has the potential to be a hugely lucrative market, but going all Khrushchev and trumpeting the demise of another medium is just gauche. It doesn't do anything but make console 'pundits' look stupid year after year, and it certainly won't help this guy.

But more importantly, innovation in entertainment is overrated. Games don't have to be innovative all the time. Quite often people want a similar experience as they had with a previous game: brand new story and environments, but similar gameplay.

Interesting, then, that you quote the upcoming Deus Ex game. The inclusion of cover-based shooting and closeup, insta-kill moves will drastically move the game ever further away from the original than the schlock that was Invisible War.

IMO the highest purpose of consoles is local multiplayer. I've got other bits of equipment (handhelds, PC) that do everything else they do far, far better.

Yet it took three releases in the Call of Duty franchise to get a decent local split-screen game out of them (yes, I'm talking about Black Ops--bots[!!!], no bullshit equipment unlocking for local games, better maps for 4-player games, better maps in general, etc.) and I still haven't seen a better splitscreen shooter than Perfect Dark!. All thes

I remember playing with banana-flinging gorillas in the early nineties. By the late nineties, I remember playing a catapult game where the target would collapse according to a fairly decent physics engine. Where's the innovation, exactly?

Actually there is a shitload of very innovative games in the independend scene, but Angry Birds is not one of them.And yes he is right to a big degree the innovation happens in the independend scene currently where people push out games like Braid, De Blob, Amnesia, Minecraft, The Ball and others.The problem simply is that this comes from the mouth of someone who has a very good game out which deservedly is highly successful, but on the originiality scale it is a rehash of some game ideas of the 80s and 90s

It's probably more fair to say that Apple / Google got moms, sisters, grandfathers, and jocks & cheerleaders, executives, and preachers playing, by giving each and every one of them a games console in their pocket. Its far easier to sell a game to someone if they already own the console than it is to sell them specialist equipment (a la Nintendo or Sony) first.

I think that big companies like EA and Ubisoft being uninnovative predates the mobile platforms by many, many years. The growth of casual gaming (which is what suits the small mobile devices) will not cut too deeply into the console market.

Mobile gaming does not compete too much with consoles because:

1) they are played at a time when you are away from home2) they are priced so low that they don't eat too much into the gaming budget. You do not have to stop buying console games to be able to afford to buy ga

Perhaps you should have quoted my first point instead if the second point. I said that the mobile games will tend to be played when the user is away from home. The platforms do not necessarily compete for the same playing time.

As for money not being a limiting factor, people have a fine amount of money to spend on their entertainment. Look at what happened to CD sales when DVDs were introduced; they plummeted. The same thing happened when video game sales skyrocketed.

"Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata went on the offensive today against his smartphone counterparts, arguing that the model pursued by individuals like Peter Vesterbacka is 'dying.' In a panel discussion at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Iwata said that innovation wasn't coming from independent game coders, but from large and established companies like his own. Iwata also pointed to the major concern over the price model for smartphone games. Compared to games on established consoles, which hover around fifty dollars, mobile titles like Angry Birds run for 99 cents and make their developers little money due to the policies of online app stores. At these price points, "there's no motivation [for] high-value video games," Iwata said. Still, the executive did admit that the business model for console games had yet to be completely figured out."

Most people just want to pick up a game to play casually, and $50 is far too much to invest for something like that...Many games are also not worth anything close to that price, a lot of games today are just minor tweaks to other games, and yet they expect you to splash out a full $50 again?

But why would I pay for those casual games? I can go to kongregate.com or a dozen other sites like it and play one of hundreds of games. I'm not going to shell out money for a casual game. I will for a long, detailed game, but those aren't the type angry birds makes.

But why would I pay for those casual games? I can go to kongregate.com or a dozen other sites like it and play one of hundreds of games. I'm not going to shell out money for a casual game. I will for a long, detailed game, but those aren't the type angry birds makes.

Two points here. On Android, Angry Birds is free / ad supported. On iPhone it's [wanders off to check; fails] some cheap price, that marketers evidently believe iPhone owners consider to be almost equivalent to free. So it's really equivalent to Kongregate on those platforms.

I think you could class AB as a long detailed game. Thought has gone into the level design. It takes several hours to complete, and several more hours to 3-star every level, as people who like the game will want to do.

he's repeating a really wrong and really dangerous, from a business stand point, notion that total market share and numbers of users dominates, it doesn't. At the end of the day, profits dominate. Rovio isn't going to see the same numbers EA or Konami or Capcom or Bethesda will. Bar none.

He's right that yes, there are way more people playing casual games, but the market for non casual games is going up.

Vesterbacka also pointed to the major concern over the price model for console games. Compared to mobile titles like Angry Birds that run for 99 cents, games on large consoles hover around fifty dollars.

Yes. In the same way that I can get a Ford Focus for £16k, but a Bugatti Veyron SS will set me back ~£1.25m.

It's ludicrous to argue that things with totally different development costs, marketing costs, distribution costs, target audiences and, let's not forget, content are priced differently and that this is somehow bad for the more expensive thing.

He's a marketing shill guys! Its his job to troll on games/platforms that his company doesnt develop for. Show me a competent developer(read: can/will develop for any platform) with the same opinion and I might start to believe it. Such a jack of all trades might not exist, but if they did they could accept work from Rovio on a mobile platform just as soon as they could accept work from WB on the next epic Mortal Kombat title. IMO this guy is comparing apples to oranges because the target audiences' are cer

It is now official. Peter Vesterbacka has confirmed: consoles are dying

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered console community when IDC confirmed that console market share has dropped yet again, now down to a fraction of 1 percent of the gaming market. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that consoles have lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. consoles are collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by falling dead last in a self selected online straw poll by Peter Vesterbacka.

You don't need to be the Amazing Kreskin to predict the future of consoles. The hand writing is on the wall: consoles have a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for consoles because consoles are dying. Things are looking very bad for consoles As many of us are already aware, consoles continue to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

Atari consoles are the most endangered of them all, having lost 100% of their core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time console developers Ralph Lippschitz and Betty Jo Underhill only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: consoles are dying.

Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

Casual gaming leader Zynga states that there were 125 million new Farmville subscribers last year. How many users of Wii are there? Let's see. The number of Farmville versus Wii posts on Facebook is roughly in ratio of 39,000 to 1. Therefore there are about 125,000,000/39000 = 3205 Wii users. PSP posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of Wii subscriptions. Therefore there are about 1600 users of the sony PSP. A recent article put Atari at about 50 percent of the PSP market. Therefore there are (3200+1600+8000=) 56005 console users. This is consistent with the number of Twitter posts.

Due to the troubles of Id software, abysmal sales and so on, Sega went out of business and was taken over by Nokia who sell another troubled platform. Now Nokia is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.

All major surveys show that Consoles steadily declined in market share. Consoles are very sick and their long term survival prospects are very dim. If consoles are to survive at all they will be among gaming dilettante dabblers. Consoles continuec to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Consoles are dead.

That crippling bombshell sent console fans into a tailspin of mourning and denial. However, bad news poured in like a river of water.

I don't even own a console (apart from the missus' Wii) but I doubt anyone would pay $50 (insert local currency as appropriate) for a copy of Angry Birds, good game though it may be - they are completely different markets and therefore comparison between the two is ludicrous.

Look at Mafia Wars and their ilk on Facebook (again, not something I play) - they've been going a year or two now but (not that I'm an expert) I've not seen the number of console games reduce particularly, so I don't think they've affec

You will NEVER see any A-Title game or blockbuster movie push the envelope. The risk is simply way too high. You know where you have to look for innovation? Flash games and YouTube. Yes, Flashgames and YouTube. Why? Because there projects can and do happen that have no budget and no ROI concerns. Do what you think is fun and see if others agree. That's pretty much it. Even Penny-Games for Mobiles isn't the innovation ground, and neither is "Alternative" and "Independent" Movies. Even they already have the ROI breathing down their neck.

Innovation happens where the crowd rules. Do you think any music exec would have invested a dime in things like Autotune-the-News? Or a game studio dropped a penny on Tower Defense? Pennygames and "alternative" publishers picked both styles up for the single reason that the free version became popular. With both you could have gone to an indie publisher and got turned away without the obvious popularity they enjoy.

You will notice a "progression", though. There are thousands of games and movies produced without a ROI in mind, for the love of it, because someone wanted to play a game like this or hear a song like this themselves. One or two of them will be popular with others, and these ideas will then be picked up by indies and published. And if there's a chance that people would drop big bucks on a "polished" version of it, big studios will pick it up.

Actually, my wife was playing Angry Birds on the PS3 on a 1080i screen earlier today. But it was only as a time waster while waiting for a phone call. I bought it to play on my PSP, but it plays on the PS3 just as well. (And my wife also just picked up Dragon Age 2 that we pre-ordered for her back in Jan., so its not just a casual gamers thing, its more of a "its a good waste of a few minutes" thing)

What you say is true about the Kinect, as shown by the success of the Wii. Casual gamers are looking for cas

>Does this silly CEO really thinks we are expecting to play the same time of games on a small 3">screen as the one we play on a full HD screen? Come on, this is a different market, and the 2>are non exclusive.

For the moment.

In the not too distant future though, cell phones and tablets will likely support wireless HDMI and the ability to drive full-sized HD screens while functioning as a controller (or working with wireless controllers or even motion controllers). Once those become commonplace, it'

Anybody who can't understand why some people find consoles better than computers should not be around computers at all, IT is not about a one size fits all mentality and people with that view should be stamped out of this industry. It is moronic to think there is a one size fits all answer, console are "Better" for many people, just as computers are "better" for others.